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Downtown apartment boom continues in Lowell

By Grant Welker, gwelker@lowellsun.com

Updated:
04/17/2016 07:02:53 AM EDT

Dan Raffol is assistant manager of Wingate Companies, manager of 24 Merrimack, a 47-unit residential development on Merrimack Street. The apartments, which opened in early March, were built inside what was formerly known as the Chalifoux Building, which housed a department store before the Great Depression of the 1930s. SUN photos / JOHN LOVE

LOWELL -- Some units have windows and ceilings that seem to soar to twice the height you'd expect in a typical apartment. Others have rooms with shapes that one can hardly imagine.

A few units have curved walls, others have inoperable exterior doors still in place, one has a closet with a window in it, and top-floor units have frosted half-moon windows that rise only to about the height of a tenant's waist.

This is the reality of reinventing a 19th-century building for modern uses, and 24 Merrimack, a new development that opened in early March downtown, has all the quirks that anyone might expect. Of its 47 units, almost none is like any other.

Apartment layouts are shown in big posters inside a sales office around the corner on Prescott Street, but they might as well be just a rough sample.

Quirky half-moon windows, such as these in the kitchen of a sixth-floor apartment, are among the unique traits at 24 Merrimack.

"We kind of had to build around history," said Daniel Raffol, the property manager and leasing agent for Wingate Companies, which manages 24 Merrimack.

The new apartments downtown add to other conversions in recent years: 52 units that opened last year at Counting House Lofts, 173 units that opened at Loft 27 in 2007, and the 130-unit Appleton Mills that opened in 2011.

It also leads the next wave of residential units to make downtown more of a 24-7 neighborhood.

Just across Prescott Street, a recent proposal calls for 22 residential units in space last used as offices for The Sun. The space has remained vacant since the newspaper moved out nine years ago.

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More than 60,000 square feet of vacant space will be renovated in two buildings: a brick building facing Kearney Square and a larger space with frontage on both Prescott Street and the Eastern Canal.

It will be a rare high-end development in a neighborhood in which city officials sometimes complain about too much subsidized housing. James Flood, an attorney for the project, said units will cost $415,000 to $480,000, calling it a "first-class development.

The former Adden Furniture factory, just off Jackson Street, is being used for a 75-unit apartment complex. SUN photos / GRANT WELKER

The project received a special permit from the Zoning Board of Appeals on March 28. It will include 47 dedicated parking spots for residents in the city-owned Lower Locks parking garage.

An additional 70 residential units are expected to hit the market as soon as the end of this year in the latest phase of the Massachusetts Mills development. Work is also expected to begin in coming months on 75 units at the Adden Lofts building just off Jackson Street.

A smaller development of nine units was also approved recently. That project, at 43-45 Market St., is envisioned for "high-end lofts," owner Francisco Tejada told the Planning Board in January.

At 24 Merrimack, tenants began moving in on March 1, with about 15 units leased immediately. Just over half of the 47 units are now taken. Rents start at just over $1,200 per month for one-bedroom units, with two-bedrooms starting at $1,650. About three-fourths of the units are two-bedroom, with one three-bedroom unit. All have in-unit laundry.

The development has attracted young professionals like Joel Day, a security and global studies professor at UMass Lowell, and his wife, Lauren Ries, a contract administrator at the university. The couple moved into a fifth-floor unit at the start of March.

"The appeal of that particular location is the downtown feel," said the 30-year-old Day, who hopes to bike to work this summer. "There are a lot of other cool places in Lowell that don't have that feeling."

The two lived in Haverhill when they first relocated to the area from California, and then were drawn to Lowell both by its urban feel downtown and a $1,500 incentive offered by the Lowell Development & Financial Corp. to UMass Lowell employees to live in the city.

"That really has a power to transform downtown Lowell and (the city) more broadly," Day said.

Eric Slagle, the city's director of development services, called it a boon for the downtown to have more residential units.

"It's a positive trend for downtown, the fact that there's still a market for housing units downtown," he said. "It's good to see some of these older buildings renovated."

The 24 Merrimack site, like many others downtown, has a lengthy history.

The Chalifoux Building, as it was long known, was built in 1906 as a department store, according to a narrative that accompanies a historical record on file with the city. An addition with a simpler design on Central Street was built around 1925.

The current building is actually the third on the site. The first was the Third Universalist Church, which was built in 1843. It later became the Second Wesleyan Methodist Church and the Central Methodist Episcopal Church.

By 1865, the building was "converted, elaborated and expanded" into a four-story wood-frame lawyers' office building called Barristers' Hall, according to the historical file. Joseph Chalifoux, a Quebec-born clothing-store owner whose name would later adorn the building, bought the site by the following year.

Chalifoux had the current Renaissance Revival structure, first known as the Colonial Building, built after Barristers' Hall burned down in 1905. The Chalifoux department store, according to the historical file, appeared to have been built too quickly, leaving it vulnerable when the Great Depression hit. The last record of the store was from 1929.

For several years afterward, it served as lawyers' offices again, with retail stores on the street below.

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